We built an iPhone app that tells you when your AI coding agent needs you
AgentShell is free on the App Store.
It's an iPhone SSH client for developers who run AI coding agents. You connect to your dev machine, and the app tells you when Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or Gemini CLI stop and wait for input. You respond from your phone, the agent keeps working.
The problem
You start an agent on a task, walk away from your desk, and ten minutes later it's sitting there waiting for a yes/no confirmation. You don't find out until you get back. Dead time for you and the agent both.
AgentShell fixes that. Your phone buzzes when the agent needs you. You answer, it keeps going, you go back to whatever you were doing.
What it does
The app watches your terminal session for supported agents. When one of them stops to ask for input, you get a push notification.
Agent status also shows up on your Lock Screen through Live Activities, so you can check without opening the app.
Voice input lets you speak your response instead of typing on a phone keyboard. Useful when you're walking around.
You can run up to 10 SSH sessions at once. All connections use standard SSH encryption (Ed25519, RSA, ECDSA), and credentials stay in iOS Keychain on your device. Nothing leaves your phone.
Getting connected
The easiest setup is Tailscale SSH. You skip key management and port forwarding entirely. Install Tailscale on your dev machine, enable SSH, and connect from AgentShell using your machine's Tailscale hostname. We wrote a step-by-step guide for it.
You can also connect with password auth or SSH keys. Keys are generated or imported in the app and stored in iOS Keychain.
What's next
We're adding detection for Aider and support for custom regex patterns so you can match any agent's prompt. Terminal rendering is getting faster scrollback and better color handling. If you hit a bug or want something specific, let us know.